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badclienton Autopsy: Lessons from Failed Startups

I'm a bit tired of seeing "product-market fit" over simplified in posts such as yours. In reality, product market fit isn't black and white. Even when you build something that people want, you might not have product market fit. Even when you've built something that nobody wants right now, you may have still product market fit. And then there are a billion shades in between.

We should talk about nuances of why startups failed. Otherwise, "lack of product market fit" is just jargon for "we failed." Of course, we already know they failed. And since they are startups, they probably didn't fail with millions in revenue.

badclienton How Andreessen Horowitz Is Disrupting Silicon Valley

They've existed for 7 years(barely). Most of their investments would be way too early to tell the results of.

badclienton Farming Startup FarmLogs (YC W12) Triples Market Share in Last Six Months

When you build a free product, the end user is not a customer, they are the product. I wonder how many farmers like being the product and not the customer.

Careful because the other extreme has its own problems: my company only has paid customers who prepay for the entire year. While this has helped us pay the bills and cover cost, it has been detrimental to building a great product because we aren't getting as much feedback as we would if we had 10x users. I'm finally reaching a stage where I may take up a job just so we can give away free trials and not have to rely as much on near term revenue to pay the bills.

badclienton Google Domains

I'm amazed that Google did not buy godaddy when it was purchased by private equity.

badclienton JQuery Notebook – A Medium-like editor wrapped inside a jQuery plugin

Is it just me or is there a lot of spacing in between lines? Every time I hit return, it feels like I've hit 3 returns.

Overall, impressive! Would pay for a quality and light one of these.

badclienton Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain

Interesting. How did you know he was suicidal? If I am convinced he is suicidal, it is easy to have a conversation. But I feel there is so much gray area and the last thing I want is to make someone who is just feeling a bit down in life from thinking about suicide.

badclienton Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain

Good for you! You make your kids' life so much easier You and your kids are both lucky!

badclienton Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain

If you know someone who is suicidal and you care about them, spend time with them. In person. Suicide is almost always committed when one is alone.

100%, although I wish we talked more about the challenge of determining that someone is suicidal.

Here's what I wrestle with the most about this. I fear that if I "misdiagnose" someone as suicidal, that I might have now given them the idea that there is such a thing as suicide and it may now become an option, completely backfiring against my goal of helping them.

I wonder if there is best practices although it seems a bit silly given we are basically trying to read someone's mind - something that even they(especially them) might not have clarity about.

badclienton Engineering Managers Should Code 30% of Their Time

At least in your case, you not only stopped coding but you stopped being around code or dealing with code. That is very different from not coding for 30%. Good chances that if you coded say 5-10% a week and spent the remaining time thinking about code architecture or code reviews, you'd be in a much different position.

badclienton Engineering Managers Should Code 30% of Their Time

Being able to code is very different from coding 30% of your time at work.

badclienton Google to Acquire Nest

No heat for you if you don't upload a profile pic. That will drive up engagement I bet.

badclienton Google to Acquire Nest

Someone at google is thinking of ways to use Google Plus to fuck up Nest.

badclienton Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

Would love a breakdown of the AWS cost.

badclienton Silicon Valley Hustle: Former Motionloft CEO Accused Of Defrauding Investors

Not necessarily. If this guy wrote bad checks, he may well be given an option to make good on it to have his sentence reduced or removed.

A similar thing happened to a guy who scammed me and others. One of the guys who was scammed went to the local cops who took out a warrant. The guy who scammed us was arrested and released almost immediately. He paid the guy through the court and his attorney. I still remain unpaid...and I didn't go to the cops(mostly because nyc cops didn't care much about the case speaking to them on the phone). You can read more here if you're curious: http://cliffkaplanfraud.com/

badclienton How Spotify builds products [pdf]

THANK YOU! I've been a loyal spotify premium member for two years going and it seems like their products are on a DOWNWARD trajectory. The mobile app used to be just fine till they updated with messed up information and ux flow. Depressing!

badclienton Ask HN: How to fire your co-founder?

One thing that helped me in my situation is that I made a document just describing my situation, written from the perspective that it is a business school case study. Then have some friends close to you read it and tell you who they think is at fault. The biggest key is that when writing the story, replace your company name and other names with made up names so people who you ask for feedback aren't biased.

This will give you first line of objective feedback even about your own positions.

badclienton Ask HN: How to fire your co-founder?

You should enlist a friend or a mentor to help you prepare with this situation. They can come up with tough questions that the board might ask you and make sure that you have a coherent, clear answer. That has helped me tremendously in clarifying my own thoughts.

You should also roleplay with this person as if he is your cofounder. Have him be a dick and make any argument you can see you cofounder make at any point. I've learned that winning arguments and being right are two different things. This way, if your cofounder is good with the former, you need to be prepared and roleplaying will give you a great edge!

Also, write down all possible scenarios. So if the board asks you "what will happen if the employees quit?" you need to have already thought through that use-case. They will probably be very impressed if you have a document that has these use-cases and possible plans.

badclienton Ask HN: How to fire your co-founder?

If I talk with my boards on his misbehaviour it will get them stressed and stop believing on the company

Sorry dude, looks like that is precisely what you are going to have to do. Don't worry about the board stressing; they can handle it. That's their job.

Focus on YOUR job: the success of the company. The board will stop believing you when you prolong this longer than you should have, actually making the situation much worse.

When you go to the board, GO PREPARED. Assume the board does not know anything. And treat it almost like a trial where you will get to present your side, and at some point, your co-founder will get to present his. In these cases, I like to open up a document and put down the facts in bullet points. When presenting, remain calm and stick to the facts, which when evaluated by a sensible party(your board), should have them arrive at the same conclusion as you.

badclienton Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

Right on. I'd use a widget to embed lyrics with audio in every blog post if they made it easy. May be integrate with spotify. And create a Wordpress plugin.

badclienton Royal pardon for codebreaker Alan Turing

Pardon? For what? Thanks but no thanks.

badclienton Ask HN: Let's predict. What's your prediction for 2014?

Google+ boss Vic Gundotra will be fired.

badclienton Is it bad practice to use your real name online?

I think the trend until mid 90s was to use your real name. Then it kind of changed at some point in 90s to nicknames. Now we seem to be going back to the early 90s when it was common to use your name.

badclienton Show HN: just released our beta, please give us feedback

The human touch of your everyday sales.

I don't know what this means. I manage a small sales team. We use salesforce.

badclienton The genius and folly of MongoDB

Bingo. They should call themselves mongodocs, not mongodb. The way I see it mongodb sees widespread misunderstanding about its use cases and instead of make the use cases more clear, they seem to take an interest in seeing mongodb being used unnecessarily.

badclienton Google Checkout Closing Down on Nov. 20th

I think failures of projects such as this can be attributed to wrongly applying lean principles instead of coming out with a more complete offering. Checkout never really matured as a product and therefore made for a poor PayPal or merchant account alternative.

badclienton New Gmail un-minimalistic homepage

As long as Gmail itself remains minimalistic

Gmail stopped being minimalistic a while ago...

badclienton Things I learned at YC

I'd make a distinction between no market and no existing market. Generally creating markets is much harder and riskier but often more profitable if you succeed.

Example: BuddyMedia created the social media management tools market; hundreds of startups are now in that market.

badclienton Xero Raises Another $150M to Do Battle With Intuit in Online Accounting Software

Did you reach out to them about increasing it?

badclienton Ask HN: I found documents on the backseat of a taxi. Can I legally use them?

Even doctors have doctors and barbers have barbers. So?

badclienton Opt out of Google using you as an ad

You're not required to have 200 friends on fb. Just unfriend the not so real friends. You could have not do real friends on google+ too if you chose.

Most my close friends are not on google+.